Epic Games Announces Fortnite Creative Mode

On their website, Epic Games announced a new mode for their absurdly popular game, Fortnite. Creative mode will let players design their own minigames like races, custom battles and more, using the game's existing building system, without being tied to the restrictions of the regular PvP or PvE modes. Epic says Battle Pass owners will have access to the private island "for the first week of Season 7," which means Thursday or Friday as far as I can tell. The mode will open up to everyone on December 13. Eurogamer and other publications reported on creative mode before the press release, and unsurprisingly, it looks like a YouTuber prematurely spilled the beans.

It looks like this announcement was due at the Game Awards, set for late on Thursday night (actually, 1.30am Friday morning UK time). But it was all leaked in granular detail overnight by YouTuber Lachlan, who was invited to play it for several days ahead of time and doesn't know how to stick to an embargo. The original 15-minute video is now offline, although it still exists via mirrors and on sites such as FortniteIntel, which have archived galleries of screenshots from it. Oops.

And in one fell swoop, Epic just created an entire generation of programmers that will move on to use their Unreal Engine in perpetuity. I love it when a good business decision ripples through a companies entire ecosystem.